Background
Most tracking systems today do not share track data with other tracking systems for a variety of reasons including differing classification levels, separation of networks, data format incompatibilities, and political or policy issues. However, in certain situations, a number of different organizations require shared situational awareness of air events to effectively respond to national threats and law enforcement concerns. Such information is usually shared by individuals physically communicating with each other via phone or other real-time communication platforms in order to reconcile any differences their respective tracking systems may be indicating.
Such a manual reconciliation of differences can be inefficient and subject to human error. Each tracking system can perform mathematical analysis in order to determine their respective set of local tracks and track numbering scheme. Previous approaches to solve this problem involve either creating a new tracking system or selecting an existing tracking system to act as a ‘central authority’. The central authority takes in all of the tracks from the participating tracking systems and performs a mathematical analysis (based on location, speed, etc.) to determine which tracks represent the same physical object, assigns a unique track number to the tracks, and sends these track-to-track mappings along with track updates to the participating tracking systems.
The main problem with this approach is one of trust and autonomy. Because operators of each tracking system are not familiar with other tracking systems and their behavior, they typically do not trust other systems. This ultimately results in the users and developers of each tracking system declining to act on the track-to-track mappings coming from the ‘central authority’ and demanding that they perform their own track analysis to see if they agree with the central tracking system. Additionally, because the premise of the ‘central authority’ strategy is one of a downward communication direction of track-to-track mappings to the tracking systems, this approach also does not accommodate disagreements among the tracking systems.